Going Steady With Weight Loss

In a millennium not long ago, and in a galaxy just south of San Francisco Bay, I was challenged to remove the final frontier from my destiny as a complete woman. A hundred pounds of ugly fat stood between me and a surgeon’s table in Colorado. I told myself “Yes! I can lose 100 pounds in nine months even if I have to drink horse urine.”

Barbara and KOMO-TV Anchor Mary Nam in 2007

Sure enough, it worked. That time in September came, and I was ready for my close-up with sex reassignment surgery. The 100 pounds were gone, I looked and felt great. But, to paraphrase perhaps the best-known philosopher to come out of Wasilla, Alaska, “the hopey-changey thing” didn’t work for me — at least in my weight loss.
It has taken at least two more trips through the annals of morbid obesity for me to figure out that the battle of the bulge is a lifetime war on terror. Every day an enemy combatant seeks to lurk in my refrigerator promising visions of sugar plums if I simply come back to the dark side.

For me, when I ate like there was no tomorrow, I privately wished there would be no tomorrow where I could continue a lifetime of lost weekends — not to mention lost weekdays. At my worst, I could consume an entire loaf of French bread between the bakery department of my local supermarket and the cashier. Paying for empty bags was my badge of courage. Exercise for me was getting up to go to the refrigerator — until even that became too painful. I thought about buying one of those recliners that had all the requirements of modern living — built-in remote, refrigerator, microwave, and toilet. I became a stand-up comedian who didn’t want to stand up. When my feared health dramas became real, suddenly I was finally motivated to not only lose weight but lose my roller-coaster ticket to Taking-Up-Space-Mountain.

I find it highly amusing that the billion-dollar American weight loss industry is focused on how quickly weight can be shed. This week, Jenny Craig was forced to drop an ad campaign featuring actress Valerie Bertinelli as part of a settlement with Weight Watchers. Weight Watchers has become the most successful weight loss program in America after hundreds of gyrations through four decades of a program that began with the idea that eating liver could motivate you to fit in your wedding dress to its current philosophy that you are to be trusted to make mistakes, but continuing to try is a better idea than giving up. That means, it’s up to you to weigh, measure your own food, try to get out of that recliner now and then, and basically act like you were born like one of these people who never had a problem with weight. There is no “death panel” where you are badgered about “end-of-diet” decisions. Instead, you are invited to check in continuously for free after a weight goal you have set on your own is achieved.

I tend to be partial to the Weight Watcher program, perhaps because in my current run, I’ve lost more than 100 pounds for the fourth time. This time, however, it has taken me three years, not nine months to shed the weight. In that long run, I’ve discovered that instant gratification in weight loss is as unhealthy as it is in weight gain. It’s true; on some weight loss programs you can drop 100 pounds in mere months. In fact, as I have proven before, you can do it again and again.